Author determined, Not meaning

In the writing “What is an author?” Michal Foucault illlustrates the concept of the author to reinforce the belief of social constructed ideologies and connotated meanings. He strongly urges that the role of an author goes to set connotation that are not objective, rather from his own empirical thinking. Foucalt also suggests that our definition of authorship did not always exist. Society created it as a set of ideas that what someone wrote, is owned and attached to them for social economical order and organization.

The ideology of an author is engraved in the concept of “authorship” to reinforce identity in a cultural sense. It brings forth the individual conciseness to an idea that supports individualism ideology. Foucault states, “the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, exludes, and chooses; by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition,decomposition, and recomposition of fiction.” The author’s connotative meaning becomes ideological to the readers because their understanding of the text is agreed and they do not question it.

The author’s discourse restricts meaning to the readers due to the fact that most readers won’t read a text and create their own concept of what the reading was about. Rather, they would accept the author’s meaning as the reliable truth. As foucault states “in writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor it is to pin a subject within a language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly dissapears.” It is the the fundemental set of assumtion that are socially constructed to determine the author as the one who predetermined the discourse.

This strengthens the idea that though the credibility society gives to the author of written works; the author’s meaning of the works is not necessarily what should and could mean to all of its readers. Nothing that the author has written is original in the sense that they have taken and written text that through their discourse, their own social experience in the world. In which sense the fact that the author wrote the text does not imply that their own connotative meaning is strict to their definition. As foucault states “it is a matter of depriving the subject (or its substitute) of its role as originator, and of analyzing the subject as a variable and complex function of discourse.

Though the ideology of an author was socially and ideologically constructed, it also serves a socio-economic use to society. The term author serves an important role in the existance of our society in which it assigns an author the identity of who wrote the works for legal and economic purposes. The ideology of the author’s function, who has written the works owns the text, is enforced especially when liability, copy, distribution and licensing rights need to be stated. These are important to the author in order to receive credibility, to be held liable for their works, as well as to receive monetary compensation. As foucault mentions “the modes of circulation, valorization, attribution, and appropriation of discourses vary with each culture and are modified within each.”

In our capitalistic society and for the sake of social and legal order the author’s function serves a purpose. However, as an example one can look at ancient times where cultures did not yet have complex economical and judicial systems. People used to tell stories to each other and in that manner stories were told from one generation to the next. There was no importance as to who invented the story nor was it claimed as truly theirs. The story constantly evolved from one person to the next with their own experience of the world, giving the people the oppurtunity to be creative and inventive to create their own meaning.

The definition of an author was given by society as an ideological set of assumtions. Although the term authorship serves various purposes in our society it subsequently deprives readers from creating their own individual connotative meaning.